VATICAN CITY — If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many prayers can be inspired by a picture? Officials at News.va are asking themselves just that question with the promotion of the Vatican’s Instagram account.

Instagram is a popular application used mainly for smart-phones and allows users to upload, edit and post photos. Users also can include captions and commentary on the bottom of the edited photos. The Vatican’s Instagram account, NEWSVA, first posted March 6 with an image of Pope Benedict’s last public audience, which was held Feb. 27, the day before his retirement. Since then, the account has been posting on a fairly regular basis.

Big Jim Griffith, the Southwestern folklore expert who writes a blog for the Arizona Daily Star, has another piece about local observances of Catholic saints’ days.

This one talks about traditions that meld appreciation for St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscans, and St. Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuits. Some perhaps understandable confusion arises because Mission San Xavier del Bac, an 18th- century landmark that is an active parish still, was named for a Jesuit named Francis, but has been administered by Franciscans, named for another Francis, most of the time since it was founded.

…the Jesuits were expelled from Sonora in 1767, to be replaced by the Franciscans, who had their own St Francis — Assisi. His feast day is Oct. 4; Xavier’s is Dec. 3. Somehow over the years things got confused so that the lying-down statue of Xavier is celebrated on Oct. 4….

Sounds like the kind of blend that would be appreciated by Pope Francis, a Jesuit who chose his name to honor the Franciscan saint, whose feast day is Oct. 4.

Filed under: CNS | Comments Off on Celebrating St. Francis, one or the other of them…

A U.S. soldier rests near a statue of Mary outside a church in the Dora district of Baghdad, Iraq, in 2007. (CNS photo/Mahmoud Raouf Mahmoud, Reuters)

VATICAN CITY — Imagine every time you wanted to go outside you needed to give 72 hours advanced notice and then be escorted by guards “armed to the teeth,” toting Kalashnikovs and making you look “like someone arrested and taken to prison.”

And because you’re caged up inside your residence, which luckily(?) is also where you work, you switch the TV on to soccer matches when you do your daily treadmill run so you can imagine that you’re free, dashing across that open field.

A screenshot of “Meet Pope Francis” video created by a group of young people at CatholicLink.

VATICAN CITY — Members of a small international group of young Catholics are looking for some extra help in translating their “Meet Pope Francis” video.

The folks at CatholicLink are now offering 19 different language versions after this week’s releases in Chinese (Mandarin), Vietnamese, Arabic, Hungarian and Maltese.

The “Meet Pope Francis” cartoon video was the group’s first original, in-house production. With simple animation and some cute anecdotes, the video is meant to help people around the world learn about the new pope — his life and ministry — in under four minutes.

An editor of The Catholic Sun in Phoenix tweets during the Catholic Media Convention in California in 2009. (CNS photo/Nancy Wiechec)

VATICAN CITY — When it comes to WWJD, Jesus would have been a natural for Twitter and TV, according to an Italian cardinal.

When Christ communicated, “he was already using television and tweets” — meaning his millennia-old style is perfectly ready and relevant for today’s media, said Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

Women religious who are part of the Bakhita Initiative: U.S. Catholic Sisters United Against Human Trafficking, met with Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., second from left, to urge passage of legislation to aid victims of human trafficking Sept. 19. (Courtesy of Bakhita Initiative)

Women religious join human trafficking foes at White House

Women religious tackling the scourge of human trafficking joined a White House summit on the issue. What the sisters saw at the summit Sept. 16 was a rising groundswell of support to restrict trafficking across the U.S. ,said Sister Margaret Nacke, a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia, Kan.

“There were people from all over the country who were in positions where they could make a difference in countering trafficking,” she told Catholic News Service.

With their presence, the sisters raised their profile among organizations working on trafficking concerns. Continue reading →